This disclosure relates generally to online systems, and more specifically to selecting content to online system users based on actions by the users greater than a reasonable amount of time after presentation of the content.
Online systems, such as social networking systems, allow users to connect to and to communicate with other users of the online system. Users may create profiles on an online system that are tied to their identities and include information about the users, such as interests and demographic information. The users may be individuals or entities such as corporations or charities. Online systems allow users to easily communicate and to share content with other online system users by providing content to an online system for presentation to other users. Content provided to an online system by a user may be declarative information provided by a user, status updates, check-ins to locations, images, photographs, videos, text data, or any other information a user wishes to share with additional users of the online system. An online system may also generate content for presentation to a user, such as content describing actions taken by other users on the online system.
Additionally, many online systems commonly allow publishing users (e.g., businesses) to sponsor presentation of content on an online system to gain public attention for a user's products or services or to persuade other users to take an action regarding the publishing user's products or services. Content for which the online system receives compensation in exchange for presenting to users is referred to as “sponsored content.” Many online systems receive compensation from a publishing user for presenting online system users with certain types of sponsored content provided by the publishing user. Frequently, online systems charge a publishing user for each presentation of sponsored content to an online system user or for each interaction with sponsored content by an online system user. For example, an online system receives compensation from a publishing user each time a content item provided by the publishing user is displayed to another user on the online system or each time another user is presented with a content item on the online system and interacts with the content item (e.g., selects a link included in the content item), or each time another user performs another action after being presented with the content item.
However, users providing content items to an online system may benefit more from user actions occurring greater than a reasonable amount of time after content items were presented to online system users. For example, changes in particular user actions over a relatively longer time interval between users who were presented with a content item and users who were not presented with a content item may provide a publishing user with a more accurate measure of the content item's effectiveness in achieving goals of a user providing a content item. As another example, user actions occurring greater than the reasonable amount of time after presentation of a content item allow a publishing user to generate content causing users to retain awareness of content for a longer duration. In another example, user actions occurring greater than the reasonable amount of time after presentation of a content item are actions that are causally disconnected from presentation of the content item, so conventional tracking methods, such as tracking pixels, are unable to readily identify the occurrence of the actions. While conventional online systems often account for likelihoods of user interaction with content items when selecting content items, the conventional online systems merely account for likelihoods of interactions performed by users recently after presentation of content items, which may not accurately predict or account for actions by users greater than the reasonable amount of time after presentation of content. Additionally, conventional online systems are often unable to account for values that a publishing user associates with different user actions, which prevents conventional online systems from optimizing the value to a publishing user of presenting content items provided to an online system by the publishing user.